The short version: Bake.Shop is $19 a month or $149 a year, which works out to $12.42 a month and saves about 35%. There is a 14-day free trial and 0% commission. The annual plan pays for itself at 7.9 months, so if you bake year-round it is the obvious buy, and if you only trade in a season shorter than eight months, monthly is genuinely cheaper. One number matters more than either: Bake.Shop routes cards through Stripe at 2.9% plus 30¢, which at $1,000 a month costs you $492 a year, more than three times the annual subscription.
Figures came from Bake.Shop's own pricing page in July 2026.
Two plans, one product. There is no feature tier to decode, which is a genuine relief in this category.
| Bake.Shop | |
|---|---|
| Subscription | $19/mo monthly, or $149/yr annually (equivalent to $12.42/mo, a 35% saving) |
| Free trial | 14 days free |
| Platform fee | $0. Bake.Shop describes itself as commission-free |
| Card processing | 2.9% + 30¢ via Stripe. In Bake.Shop's own words, that fee goes to Stripe rather than to them |
Both plans include the same product: unlimited orders, unlimited menu items, and inventory tracking. You are not buying capability with the annual plan, only a lower monthly rate.
Straight division, and the answer is more useful than the marketing percentage.
$149 ÷ $19 = 7.84 months.
So the annual plan is cheaper than paying monthly if you will use Bake.Shop for eight months or more. Under that, monthly costs less. Worked through:
That 7.9-month line is the whole decision, and it is the one most people skip. The "Save 35%" badge is accurate for a year-round business and misleading for a seasonal one.
Yes, in most cases, and this is where the arithmetic earns its keep.
A baker who trades from October through December, taking holiday orders and nothing else, uses the software for three months. Monthly costs $57. Annual costs $149. Paying annually because it is "better value" costs that baker $92 for nine months of not baking.
The same applies to farmers-market bakers with a May-to-October season: six months at $114 monthly against $149 annually. Monthly wins by $35.
The trap is that annual billing is framed as the smart choice on every pricing page in software, and for year-round businesses it usually is. Seasonal food businesses are the exception, and nobody puts that on the page.
The practical test: count the months you will actually take orders. Eight or more, pay annually. Fewer, pay monthly and cancel when the season ends. If you are unsure whether your season will extend, pay monthly for the first year and switch once you know.
The subscription is not the number that decides anything, and it is worth seeing why.
At $1,000 a month across 40 orders, Stripe's 2.9% plus 30¢ costs you $29 plus $12, or $41 a month. Over a year that is $492 in processing.
So the plan choice is worth $79 and the processing is worth $492. Both are real, but only one of them is where the money is, and the pricing page naturally directs your attention to the smaller one.
At $3,000 a month, processing becomes $1,188 a year and the subscription decision shrinks to background noise. That is worth knowing before you spend an evening deliberating over $79.
The way to actually move that larger number is not to hunt for a cheaper platform. Every serious option in this category charges within a few tenths of a point of the same rate, because they are all paying the card networks. What moves it is order size. The 30¢ per order is fixed, so it costs you 1.2% on a $25 order and 0.3% on a $100 one. A baker who nudges the average basket from $25 to $40, with a bundle or a minimum, cuts the fixed-fee share by more than a third without negotiating anything with anyone.
Yes, and it is the strongest thing about this pricing model, though the phrase gets used loosely across the category.
Commission-free means Bake.Shop takes no percentage of your sales. What you pay is $19 or $12.42 a month plus Stripe's rate, and nothing scales with your revenue on Bake.Shop's side.
Compare that to a platform charging 5% plus 55¢ per order. At $1,000 a month across 40 orders, that is $72 a month, or $864 a year, against Bake.Shop's $149. Even against a platform charging 3%, you are looking at $360 a year in commission that a flat subscription simply does not have.
The crossover is where flat pricing wins. A 5% commission equals Bake.Shop's $149 annual plan at roughly $3,000 in annual sales, and equals the $228 monthly total at about $4,560. Above those, flat pricing wins by increasing amounts, which is why almost every serious vendor eventually leaves percentage models.
Our full look at Bake.Shop for home bakers covers the product beyond its price.
Fourteen days is enough to answer real questions, and worth using deliberately rather than clicking around.
Point five is where most bakery software either fits or does not. If you need a Friday cutoff for Saturday collection, a limit on how many of one item you can sell, and a different arrangement for a second location, find out in the trial rather than after you have paid for a year.
Note the sequencing too: start the trial when you have a real order weekend coming, not on a quiet Tuesday. A trial spent on hypothetical orders tells you nothing.
Fourteen days is also shorter than it sounds against the competition. Bakesy gives you 30, Local Line gives 7 with no card required, and Cottage CMS's free tier means you never start a clock at all. So plan the fortnight rather than drifting through it, and if you want a genuine comparison, run the same order weekend through a second platform in parallel instead of running two trials a month apart and comparing memories.
Annual billing is a commitment, and $149 is small enough that people commit without asking anything. A few questions are worth the five minutes.
Question one matters most for a seasonal baker who reads the 7.9-month rule, decides on monthly, and then wonders whether to switch mid-year. Question four matters because a mobile app is the difference between managing orders from the kitchen and managing them from a laptop in another room.
Running a food business from home also means the ordinary obligations of any employer eventually arrive, and the moment you take on even part-time help, the rules change. The EEOC's small business guidance is a readable starting point for what applies at what headcount, and OSHA's small business resources cover the workplace-safety side. Neither is urgent at one person and both arrive faster than most vendors expect.
Roughly mid-range, and the annual plan is the competitive number.
Bake.Shop's $12.42 a month on the annual plan sits above the cheapest options and below the mid-tier ones. Where it wins is the combination of 0% commission and a standard 2.9% Stripe rate, which beats Bakesy's 3.9% at almost any real volume despite Bakesy's lower subscription.
Worth doing that one properly, since the headline prices point the wrong way. Take $12,000 a year across 480 orders of $25:
Bake.Shop is $91 cheaper, despite costing $29 more in subscription, because the one-point processing gap is worth $120 a year at that volume. At $30,000 a year the same comparison is $1,650 against $1,379, and Bake.Shop wins by $271.
The crossover runs the other way only at very small scale. Bakesy's $29 annual subscription advantage covers a one-point processing gap up to about $2,900 a year in sales. Below that, Bakesy is cheaper. Above it, and that is nearly everyone, Bake.Shop is.
Our comparisons of Bakesy vs Bake.Shop and Bake.Shop vs Cottage CMS work those through in full.
Worth listing plainly, because a low subscription can hide work that lands back on you.
That first one is the largest hidden cost in this whole category. Registering, calculating, filing, and remitting sales tax is a recurring quarterly obligation that no $149-a-year subscription removes, and doing it by hand costs hours every cycle.
If those hours are the thing you are actually trying to buy back, Homegrown is $10 a month billed annually with 0% commission and 2.9% plus $0.30 processing published up front, and it handles pickup at each place you sell with its own schedule and cutoff, local delivery with a radius and a route, and sales tax calculated, filed, and remitted in all 50 states. The honest bounds: it is not bakery-specific. There is no recipe or ingredient costing, no baker-oriented production planning, and no national shipping. If those matter, Bake.Shop is built for you in a way a general storefront is not. You can put one order weekend through it alongside a Bake.Shop trial and compare them on your own orders rather than on two pricing pages.
$19 a month billed monthly, or $149 a year billed annually, which works out to $12.42 a month and saves about 35%. There is a 14-day free trial and no commission on sales.
No. It describes itself as commission-free. What you pay on top of the subscription is Stripe's card processing at 2.9% plus 30¢, and Bake.Shop states plainly that this fee goes to Stripe rather than to them.
It pays for itself at 7.9 months, so yes if you trade year-round. If your season is shorter than eight months, monthly is genuinely cheaper: a three-month holiday baker saves $92 by paying monthly.
About $641 a year on the annual plan: $149 in subscription plus roughly $492 in Stripe processing across 40 orders a month. On the monthly plan it is $720.
At almost any real volume, yes, despite Bakesy's lower subscription. Bakesy charges 3.9% against Bake.Shop's 2.9%, and that gap outweighs the $29 subscription difference above about $2,900 a year in sales. At $12,000 a year Bake.Shop is roughly $91 cheaper; at $30,000 a year it is about $271 cheaper.
Cancellation terms are not detailed on the pricing page, so ask before you commit to a year. This matters most for seasonal bakers, who should default to monthly anyway.
Nothing on its pricing page advertises filing or remitting on your behalf. Assume registration, collection, filing, and remittance remain yours in every state where you have an obligation.
Bake.Shop's pricing is refreshingly simple: one product, two billing options, no commission, and a card rate it names and attributes to Stripe rather than dressing up as its own.
The decision comes down to one number. The annual plan breaks even at 7.9 months, so year-round bakers should pay annually and save $79, and anyone with a season shorter than eight months should pay monthly and save up to $92. That is the opposite of what every pricing page implies, and it is worth getting right.
Then stop thinking about it. At $1,000 a month in sales, the plan choice is worth $79 a year and processing is worth $492. If you want to reduce what selling costs you, that is where the money actually is.
